A GROUP OF FRENCH FRIENDS.

THOSE are happy who have been privileged to know men and women of
the old French type, showing forth that fine fleur
de la civilisation which gave its language and its breeding to
the diplomacy of Europe, and which was not only unique in charm, but closely
allied to the highest qualities of mind and heart. Two such people, a man
and a woman, are still vividly remembered with respect and affection by
their younger contemporaries. They were unrelated, but lived in the same
village; they were substantially of the same generation, and died within a
year of each other. The man was Comte Adolphe de Circourt, the woman
Mademoiselle Adelaide de Montgolfier. I will try to draw their portraits as
best I can.

The Comte de Circourt belonged to a noble family of Lorraine; his ancestors
were not
page: 271 wealthy, they possessed neither
chateau nor fortified manor, but their lineage went back to the Crusades.
His parents were betrothed so long ago as 1792, but the marriage project was
broken by the Revolution; the bride’s father and mother were imprisoned, and
the bridegroom was engaged in the Royalist army, serving under his relative,
General de Viomesnil. The young people did not even meet for many years, but
in quieter times the engagement was renewed, and their marriage took place
somewhere about 1800. Adolphe de Circourt, their eldest child, was born on
the 22nd of September, 1801. The married pair were both literary in their
tastes, the father read with delight Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Jean
Jacques Rousseau; his wife belonged to one of the old patrician families of
Besançon, and was allied to parliamentary circles and the noblesse de la robe. Her education was both
serious and learned, she had artistic faculty and painted well. Thus Adolphe
de Circourt and his younger brothers received their earliest education from
their own father and mother, who had been left by the Revolution poorer in
worldly goods than if they had been
page: 272 small
shop‐keepers. The garden of their little cottage was laid out in fruits,
vegetables, and a few flowers; it also contained a small chapel where mass
was privately said before the family and certain select neighbours. Adolphe
was baptized in this chapel by a proscribed priest, for the parish churches
closed by the Revolution were not yet reopened, and there were penalties for
celebrating the rites of religion. Their nearest neighbour was an Irish
gentleman, a Chevalier de Saint‐Louis, and the son of an officer who had
fought at Culloden. The first work of art beheld by the little de Circourts
was an excellent pastel of Charles Edward, whose pale face appeared to their
infant eyes to be that of a hero and a saint! Adolphe de Circourt was a very
precocious child. He read with avidity before he was four years old. A
priest was called in to teach him Latin, but the child soon knew as much as
the priest, and he went on devouring books, and translated a German grammar
into Latin at eight years old. As all the little brothers would necessarily
have to provide for themselves in the future, the family moved into Besançon
in search of
page: 273 education. Their maternal
grandmother, Madame de Sauvagney, lived in that town, but they had not for
long the comfort of her society; she died within three years, shortly after
the death of her son‐in‐law, and her daughter soon followed her to the
grave, leaving the five little boys doubly orphaned. Adolphe was then only
eleven years old. They had however an uncle, M. Mareschal de Sauvagney, a
former parliamentary councillor, and he proved a good guardian to his
sister’s sons.

Two of the orphans died in childhood; of the remaining three, Arthur was sent
to Saint Cyr, Albert went into the navy, and Adolphe was destined to a legal
and administrative career in Paris. He was warmly received by his relative,
become Marshal de Viomesnil. The Royalist party were in the ascendant, and
young de Circourt, a brilliant scholar and the most correct of men, managed
to live on an annual income of fifty pounds, until his appointment in 1822
to a post in the Ministry of the Interior, where his salary was £60 a year.
In five years he had risen to be sous‐chef de
bureau, at £180 salary, and two years later he was Chef du
Cabinet
page: 274 of the Ministère. But the
Revolution of 1830 fell heavily on the brothers, who belonged by every
association to the service of the older Bourbon. Poor as they were, Adolphe
and Albert resigned their posts; Arthur remained in his regiment. Thus,
scanty as are the salaries allotted to the civil servants of France, Comte
Adolphe de Circourt found himself in 1830 obliged by his political
conscience to renounce his own; and it must have seemed for the moment as if
there were no future open for the gifted young man. But in that very same
year a great good came to him.

In the winter of 1827, he had become acquainted in Paris with two interesting
Russian ladies, Madame de Klustine (née
Comtesse Tolstoi) and her daughter. The mother was a distinguished woman of
the world, but the daughter was unusually cultured, and had already written
a remarkable paper upon Russian literature and literary men. This had
appeared in the Bibliothèque Universelle without the author’s
name, and had been reproduced in several French publications. At the time of
their first acquaintance these ladies had been painfully occupied
page: 275 with the disappearance of the eldest son and
brother at the Siege of Varna. His body could not be found among the dead,
and the mother and sister entertained vague hopes that he might have been
taken prisoner. Adolphe de Circourt used his influence in the French Foreign
Office to obtain some certain news, and his brother Albert, who was then
afloat on the Mediterranean, tried to discover the missing man on the
Turkish littoral. At last a letter from the surviving brother came to assure
them that the young man was really dead; but the vain search had naturally
endeared Adolphe de Circourt to Madame de Klustine, and in 1830 she made no
objection to her daughter giving herself and her modest fortune to the
almost penniless young Frenchman. In the following year the mother was
recalled to Russia by important affairs, and M. de Circourt took his wife to
Besançon to make the acquaintance of his relations, where she got on
excellently with the guardian uncle and the two aunts. For some years the
wedded pair travelled in Italy, Switzerland, and France—they did not fix
definitely in Paris till 1837. Then began for them a most interesting life.
Madame de Circourt
page: 276 opened her salon to distinguished people of all
nationalities; though her husband at first would hardly believe that people
would mount to an apartment on a third story, to visit people who were not
particularly rich, and were attached to no public office; but he had soon to
own that he was mistaken.

Under the reign of Louis Philippe the court circle was not socially
influential. The rigid piety of Queen Amélie, the strict domestic life led
at the Tuileries and at St. Cloud, the death of the Duke of Orleans, and the
anxiety felt by the King for his other sons on dangerous service in Africa,
and also the recurrent political difficulties of the reign, left a freer
field for private social ambition than might otherwise have been possible.
The de Circourts lived in the Rue do Saussayes, and the Comtesse appears to
have received her friends every day from four to six, and also on Tuesday
evenings. She was a most brilliant mistress of a salon; she was great in little notes of special invitation.
She was always kind and helpful to distinguished foreigners in Paris, and
she took much trouble to help young and unknown talent. For many years after
her death, these
cosmo‐
page: 277 politan
cosmopolitan
reunions continued to be remembered and talked of.

In the “Life of M. de Circourt,” a series of interesting letters from the
historian Sismondi to the Comtesse are given at length. They show Sismondi
in a very human light; and of special interest is the one dated 30th
September, 1838, in which he laments the death of Madame de Broglie, the
daughter of Madame de Staël. He says that during her lifetime he had been
chilled by the intense pietistic atmosphere in which she dwelt, and into
which he could not follow her; but no sooner was she dead than he felt how
much he loved her, how deep was his respect for her virtues, and how great
his appreciation of her talents. In politics Sismondi had been a most
hopeful philosopher up to the year 1832. It is melancholy to note in his
latter letters how keenly he felt, as years went on, the small result of the
liberal principles, from which he had hoped so much.

Sismondi, who had married an English wife (the sister of Lady Mackintosh and
Mrs. Wedgewood), was a moderate Liberal of the most thoughtful type. It was
well for him that he
page: 278 did not live to see
1848 and the reaction. He died, in 1842, of a lingering illness of which the
chief suffering consisted in a growing inability to take nourishment. He
compared himself to Count Ugolino, repeating a verse from Dante’s “Inferno,”
“Galandi con Sismondi et con Lanfranchi,”’ and adding, “Am I then condemned
to die by the same torture as Ugolino, in expiation, after the lapse of five
centuries, of the crime of an ancestor?” But these pathetic words, wrung
from him by suffering, are in no way the reflection of his honourable,
useful, and far from unhappy life.

In 1848, Adolphe de Circourt was sent by Lamartine as ambassador to Berlin,
and the chapter of his experiences is of much political interest. He became
a personal friend of Frederick William the Fourth of Prussia, who took
delight in his society. In leaving Berlin, he refused every diplomatic
distinction, but three years later the king sent de Circourt his own
portrait painted on porcelain, executed at the famous royal manufactory, and
wrote an autograph letter assuring his friend that he need not scruple to
accept the gift, as it had cost him (the king) nothing but the frame.

page: 279

More interesting, however, to the student of history, is the chapter relating
to the Comte de Chambord, of whom de Circourt saw much at Frohsdorf. The
Parisian’s wide reading and philosophic habit of mind caused him to have no
faith in revolutions, or in unproved political theories of any kind. Not
merely because he had inherited Legitimist principles, but because France
had been created, moulded, and made great by the secular influences of the
old monarchy, did Adolphe de Circourt hold to his king. His point of view
was very peculiar and very interesting. As in religion he had always
remained a sincere Catholic, of a thoughtful and liberal type, so in
politics he was a convinced Royalist in theory, but perfectly capable of
analyzing the character of a monarch. One is tempted to say, in reading his
reports of conversations with Henri Cinq, that both the men were too
reasonable to be able to descend efficiently into the sphere of modern
politics. De Circourt gives the impression that Henri held to the White Flag
not from romantic obstinacy, but from a reasoned conviction that any attempt
to reinstate him on the throne of his ancestors would fail, unless the main
principles
page: 280 of historic right were
genuinely conceded by France. He did not wish to be a second “Citizen King,”
and saw no practical good in the renewing of an experiment which had already
signally failed; yet it cannot be denied that by reason of his secluded
position at Frohsdorf, he was less aware than was the Comte de Circourt of
the immense changes which modern science and industrial development had
brought to pass among the nations of Europe. For good or for evil the old
habits of mind had passed away, and were replaced by new conceptions of
human life. None knew this better than the guest who came from Paris to
offer his homage to an exiled king. Of the two high‐minded women whose lives
were so closely associated with that of the Comte de Chambord, his Italian
wife and his aunt, Madame d’Angoulême, Dauphine of France, and daughter of
Marie Antoinette, a life‐like description is given, and they undoubtedly
exercised a permanent influence on the situation.

During the first twelve years of the Second Empire, Madame de Circourt
continued to receive her friends as usual. In 1856, the year of the Congress
of Paris, her rooms were filled
page: 281 with
foreign diplomats, although a sad accident had already rendered her an
invalid. On a summer evening she had sent her servants away to enjoy
themselves at one of the fairs so popular in France, and in sealing a letter
the lace strings of her cap caught fire; she was severely burnt on the left
side of her neck and shoulders, and the result was a state of suffering
which lasted for some eight years, and finally caused her death in 1863; but
although chiefly recumbent, she never ceased to entertain her friends. She
was only fifty‐three when the end came, and her loss made a sad difference
to her husband; he gave up his apartment in Paris, and his only home
remained the charming house in its large garden called “Les Bruyères” at La
Celle Saint Cloud. It was there that for many years I had the honour of well
knowing the Comte Adolphe de Circourt, and of listening to that astonishing
conversation which no words of mine can adequately describe.

It is my conviction that he knew more on various subjects than any man alive.
It was a jest in our family to try and find out some unlikely subject on
which to question M. de
Cir‐
page: 282 court
Circourt
, in the faint hope that we might catch him tripping. Once we tried
the history, lineage, morals, and manners of Prester John. Another time we
expressed ignorance of some of the most intimate details of the Reformation
in England; on both questions our remark was like the turning on of a golden
tap. Some allusion being one day made to Marie Antoinette, M. de Circourt
suddenly said, “Do you know why the royal carriage was late in starting for
Varennes?” Needless to say that no one present knew why that fatal hour had
been lost. He then explained, with the utmost detail, that while the
carriage was being packed in the courtyard of the Tuileries, the governess
of the royal children, Madame de Toursel, descending the stairs with her
young charges, found Louis the Sixteenth painfully exercised in mind as to
where she should sit in the great roomy carriage. It was impossible to
provide for the usual etiquette, which was so completely a law in the French
court that the delay of nearly an hour took place before the matter could be
settled. To hear M. de Circourt’s description of the scene, one would have
thought he had been on duty
page: 283 that night in
the Palace ten years before he was born.

The universality of his knowledge was only to be matched by that of his
worldly relations. He was as intimate at the Deanery of Westminster as in
Legitimist chateaux. He knew the best
people in every capital in Europe, and was as familiar with Protestants as
with Catholics in Germany, England, Austria, and Italy. His little
drawing‐room at Les Bruyères was always completely dressed in white, and in
summer the fireplace and mantel‐shelf were masses of green‐growing ivy
trained in pots and rising to the ceiling, while on the walls were a few
very choice portraits and mementoes of the most remarkable people in Europe,
among them several exquisite bronze medallions by David d’Angers. It was the
prettiest room imaginable, and marked in every detail by an exquisite
refinement of taste. The Comte de Circourt possessed a very delicate and
charming face, of which age had not injured the outline. At church he had as
an old man the habit of standing during the most solemn parts of the mass,
shielding his eyes with his hand, and his
page: 284
attitude was one of profound reverence. It is so that I like best to
remember him. He was stricken for death while walking upon the road which
crests the hill of La Celle Saint Cloud, and in sight of one of the most
beautiful views in the world, looking across the valley of the Seine towards
the hills of Normandy. He was found lying alone and unconscious, his hat and
stick fallen by his side: whatever were his last thoughts, they were
assuredly good and peaceful, as had been his whole life. He was buried in
the little cemetery of La Celle Saint Cloud, by the side of his wife; and
Madame de Klustine, who had attained a very great age, was within a few days
laid within a neighbouring grave, having been spared all knowledge that he
who had been to her as a dutiful son for fifty years, had passed away before
herself. There are few men of this century of whom it can more truly be
said, that in all which he renounced, and in all which he fulfilled, he
thoroughly exemplified the meaning of the old proverb “Noblesse oblige.”

page: 285

MADEMOISELLE ADELAIDE DE MONTGOLFIER.

NO biography of this very distinguished Frenchwoman has appeared,
except a paragraph in a great dictionary, recording her few books by their
titles, and giving a wrong date of her birth; not an unimportant matter, as
will be seen in the story of her life. She was the only person whom I ever
heard speak of the French Revolution as an eye‐witness of the smallest fact.
This aged lady, who was the closest friend of our family, was born in 1789,
and lived to be ninety. She was therefore four years old at the death of
Marie Antoinette; but as she lived not in Paris but at Annonay, near Lyons,
that which she remembered distinctly was being awakened by men with torches
in the middle of the night; men who came searching under her little bed for
a hunted priest.

page: 286

The Montgolfiers were very wealthy, important people, who were known to
protect the clergy, and their various houses were the scene of frequent
domiciliary visits from the revolutionary authorities.

Nearly two hundred years ago President Montgolfier was a large paper‐maker in
Annonay. He received that title as being at the head of some great
commercial corporation having its chief centre at Lyons. He had nine
children, and lived in patriarchal fashion among his workpeople, and
surrounded by relatives. They were all important members of that Tiers Étât
of which so little is known in England, and which on its upper level was
allied to the noblesse de la robe. Two of
President Montgolfier’s sons became famous as joint inventors of the
balloon. Their names were Joseph and Etienne, and the latter was the father
of Adelaide de Montgolfier. Joseph was the eldest of the two, and must from
the first have had a lively mind, for at the age of thirteen he ran away
from the College de Tournon, setting out gallantly for the shores of the
Mediterranean, intending to live upon shell‐fish. Hunger compelled him
page: 287 to stop on the way at a farm in Bas
Languedoc, where he was employed to pick mulberry‐leaves for the rearing of
silk‐worms. There his distracted parents found him and sent him back to
school.

Joseph’s intellectual passion was for calculation and the higher mathematics,
and a strong thread of eccentricity ran through his nature. Arrived at
manhood he went off to a sort of hermitage, where he lived by fishing, and
devoted himself to chemistry.

He made with his own hands Prussian blue and many salts needed in
manufactures, and peddled them in the Vivarais. At length his wealthy father
got him back, and set him to his natural work in the paper fabrique; but he never ceased making
experiments and getting into divers schemes and much hot water. Meanwhile
his brother Etienne, five years younger, was trained as an architect, and,
according to the family tradition, fell upon a translation of one of Dr.
Priestley’s works on air; on which he rushed to his wife, saying, “If what
this Englishman says is true respecting the relative density and weight of
warm and of cold air, we can raise a light machine
page: 288 above the earth.” The two brothers then laid
their scientific heads together, probably much troubling the respectable
President, and made the splendid invention of which the last word is as yet
far from being said.

After a first successful trial at Annonay, Etienne, though so much the
youngest, was sent on a mission to Paris, where the idea was eagerly caught
up by the scientific world, then in full activity previous to the
Revolution, and he was invited to send off a balloon from the gardens of
Versailles in the presence of the king and queen, and “all the court
beside.” The experiment proved a splendid success, and the brothers were
offered a patent of nobility, which they refused, unless it were first
conferred upon the old President, their father. In 1832, Mademoiselle de
Montgolfier and Madame Swanton‐Belloc spent a first summer at La Celle St.
Cloud, and saw an old woman living in the village who well remembered the
fall of that balloon in a neighbouring wood. Some of these particulars are
to be found in an article written by Mademoiselle de Montgolfier for the
Biographie Universelle in 1821, others she told to me
herself.

page: 289

Etienne de Montgolfier did not live to be old. He married a Mademoiselle
Brun, who in her early youth had been by some family intrigue made to take
the veil. At the age of eighteen she appealed to Rome, and Rome set her
free. She became the Madame de Montgolfier who survived her husband so many
years that she became legendary in Paris. In the forties a quite fantastic
story was set about of a workman finding a very old lady in the street, who
said she had forgotten her own name, on which the workman said politely, “Ah, then you must be Madame de Montgolfier,” and
straightway took her to her home! She was popularly said to have died at the
age of one hundred and twelve, but she really was in all probability a
century old, and there is no genuine record of her having failed in mind.
She died in 1845, and is buried in our family grave at La Celle. Her husband
predeceased her nearly half a century. He was deeply and fatally affected by
the tragic events of the French Revolution. He only himself escaped death by
the devotion of his workpeople, who hid him in a moment of extreme danger.
But his daughter told me that what really shook
page: 290 his health was the death of his dear friend
Malesherbes, the defender of Louis the Sixteenth, which took place under
peculiarly horrible circumstances. The son‐in‐law of Malesherbes, the
President de Rosambo, imprisoned with him, had been taken away from his side
for execution a few days before, and Malesherbes himself on the 22nd of
April, 1794, was placed in the same cart as his daughter, Madame de Rosambo,
and his granddaughter, Madame de Chateaubriand, and her husband. These had
entreated to be allowed to share the same prison as the old man, and their
wish had been granted. The young people were first guillotined, then Mme. de
Rosambo, and lastly Malesherbes himself. The horror of that day, falling on
the vivid, sensitive nature of Etienne de Montgolfier, was never recovered,
though he survived for five years. His heart became affected, and he went in
1799 to Lyons with his family in search of medical advice. Feeling the
approach of death, and “wishing to save his wife and children the sight of
his death‐bed,” he started to return alone to Annonay, but did not reach his
home alive. He died upon the way, at Serrières,
page: 291 on the 2nd of August, 1799, when his little
daughter was only ten years old. She survived him for eighty‐one years. No
stronger proof of hereditary faculty can be cited than the case of Mlle. de
Montgolfier. She was so good an artist, so good a writer, and so intelligent
an organizer of daily life, that she might have excelled in any special
department of activity to which she had devoted herself. At eighty years of
age she was still at her easel, still wielding a lively pen, and still
practically keeping a very complicated household. She was tiny in person,
with a face full of expression, and her most marked characteristic was an
extraordinary sensibility, using the word in its highest and best sense. She
seemed a human harp on which every influence of nature, and every joy and
grief of others played in turn. Her musical faculty had been keen, she wrote
poems and set them to music. Her “Melodies du Printemps” were well known in
France, and are delicate flowers of fancy. When nearly ninety she was fond
of playing one particular air upon the piano; it was a Belgian Carillon, and
the touch of her frail fingers seemed to the hearers to produce a
wonderful
page: 292 effect of melodies in the
upper air, shaken down from high towers upon the children of men.

Mlle. de Montgolfier was liberal in politics. She reminded one of the
pre‐revolutionary thinkers who finally sealed with their blood their
devotion to the rights of man; and she scorned to allow the crimes of the
ultra party to make her unjust.

She preserved a profound silence about religion, but went to Mass every
Sunday. If the Gallican element had remained as an influence in French
thought, creating a party, it is my impression that she would have been very
Gallican, or perhaps a liberal Jansenist.

As it was, she said nothing, but accepted the ministrations of an old priest
who knew her well and understood her points of view, and she passed away
munie des sacraments de l’Eglise. Ten
years before her death occurred the Siege of Paris, when she absolutely
refused to leave the city, or even the house not far from the Luxembourg
where she had lived for forty years; although it was on the south side of
Paris and exposed to Prussian bombs sent from
page: 293 the hills in possession of the enemy. It was not
far from that orphanage in which eight children were killed in their beds.
Every other family in the large dwelling‐house shut their apartments and
departed, but Mlle. de Montgolfier resolutely stayed on in her flat, with
her maid and a young lad for the outdoor service, doubly necessary during
the siege, when every pound of food had to be obtained by standing in the
queue, and she merely filled a huge
bath with water and put it on the landing outside her door “to quench the
bombs.” This old Frenchwoman of eighty spent her days for four months of
that bitter winter attending an ambulance ever full of wounded soldiers
brought in from the sorties, and when the siege was over it was found that
Mademoiselle had torn up all her sheets and table‐cloths for dressings, and
had then taken her own delicate stock of body‐linen, so that her maid said
tearfully, “Elle ne s’est pas même gardée une seule
chemise.” And this extraordinary bravoure which responded to a call of duty like that of some
old knight taking down his arms from the wall, was adorned in daily
intercourse with a most elaborate courtesy, a perfect politeness, of
page: 294 which the modern world shows no example.
If it were at first artificial in the original conception of the Versailles
of the seventeenth century, it had become entirely natural to French people
of social rank after its adoption by three or four succeeding generations.
Educated by a mother who had been young under Louis the Fifteenth, and who
had occupied in the Ardêche a great provincial position—brought to Paris
when still a child, and accustomed to the conversation and the manners of
the choicest cosmopolitan world as the inheritrix of a scientific name—Mlle.
de Montgolfier blended in her own person all the best elements of French
breeding. The Fairy Godmother had allotted her every gift except that of
beauty, and she seems to have early made up her mind not to marry, though
suitors were not wanting. The chief interest of a most affectionate heart
was her enduring friendship of sixty years with Mme. Swanton‐Belloc, whose
noble portrait in the Louvre enables this generation to understand the
devotion she inspired. To this lady’s children, and particularly to the only
son, Mlle. de Montgolfier was a second mother. To the
page: 295 youngest generation she became in her old age the
dear “Maman Aide” they will never forget; a gracious figure of the France
which has passed away.